False Convictions (22 page)

“Look at the other two,” the judge said.

Casey sat back down and read on. They were similar to the first, varying only in location and time and that one was a teenage
boy, also sodomized after his face had been mutilated but before he’d been stabbed. The murders were spread out across the
two years previous to Cassandra Thornton’s, all at varying towns in New York that Casey hadn’t heard of. Cassandra Thornton
would have been the fourth if the crimes were put into sequence.

“These happened close by?” Casey asked.

The judge remained rigid, her chin tilted up. She blinked and nodded. “Small towns, small police forces. Each of them just
far enough apart. Small media markets. None of them overlapping. No leads in any of the cases, although we believe that the
killer had some kind of personal contact with each of them. No one ever connected the dots.”

“How did you find these?” Casey asked, handing back the file of police reports and crime scene photos. “What do they have
to do with Dwayne Hubbard? There was nothing about any of this in his case.”

“Because I didn’t let it,” the judge said.

Casey shook her head. “You’re talking even crazier.”

“Come with me,” the judge said, standing up and motioning for Casey to follow. “Let me show you.”

J
UDGE RIVERS went out through the front doors and down the steps with the folder in her hand.

“And we’re going where?” Casey asked.

“Cassandra Thornton’s.”

“Her grave?”

“Her home,” the judge said, and climbed into the front of the Suburban.

“Twenty years later?”

“You’ll see.”

Casey got in back.

“You met Martin already,” the judge said, twisting around.

“I met a guy with crazy sideburns and a chrome-plated forty-five,” Casey said.

The judge’s face darkened. “Christ, Martin. I told you to keep it in your pants.”

Martin’s face colored as he started the engine and put the truck into gear. “And I told you about the kind of people we’re
dealing with.”

Judge Rivers just shook her head.

“Don’t worry, I had a crazy aunt worried constantly about being abducted by aliens,” Casey said, getting a sharp glance from
Martin in the mirror.

“Martin and I met because of this case,” the judge said. “Martin Yancy?”

“The investigating officer,” Casey said, recalling the name on the police report she’d read and studying him in a different
light. “Pretty sloppy work.”

“Actually,” the judge said, “Martin was the best, but I was able to convince him to hold off on anything thorough until he
looked into the other possibilities. We went through a lot together and we learned the truth. We’ve been together ever since.
He’s as protective as he is reliable, though. I’m sorry about the gun.”

“I mean, he just jumps me on the street and forces me into the truck,” Casey said, still steamed.

“Christ, Martin.”

“I told you I wouldn’t hurt you,” Martin said defensively, addressing Casey in the mirror as they pulled up the long gravel
drive. As if to prove his goodwill, he handed her purse back.

“Right. Ten minutes into my abduction,” she said, snatching it.

“This is a dangerous situation,” Martin said.

Casey folded her arms across her chest and said, “I’d like to bring a friend, too, if you don’t mind.”

“Not from the Freedom Project?” the judge said.

“No, but why not?” Casey asked.

The judge glanced at Martin, who said, “The people pulling the strings are using the Freedom Project to destroy Patricia.”

“Are you saying Robert Graham?” Casey asked.

The judge turned around. “We’re not saying him or anyone. I’m not as concerned as Martin, but someone dredged this case up
to get at me.”

“Why? Who? Why would they wait this long?” Casey asked.

“The court of appeals,” Martin said, entering the traffic circle and heading back into town through a steady flow of people
returning home from work.

“Maybe some fanatic pro-life group? I don’t know,” the judge said. “The court right now is more conservative than it’s ever
been. My appointment wouldn’t help their cause. Wouldn’t
have
helped, I should say. It’s over for me now. I know that.”

“Patricia is Supreme Court material,” Martin said, his teeth clenched. “She’s got all the qualifications. This was the next
step. Anyone who would mess with that is dangerous enough to carry for.”

“Martin, if someone was going to kill me,” the judge said, explaining to him, “they would have done that instead of going
to all this trouble.”

“What trouble?” Martin asked with a skeptical look.

“Hiring Ms. Jordan to come up here all the way from Texas,” the judge said, “working the media. Christ, they had Brad Pitt
at the press conference. That doesn’t just happen.”

“So, I can bring someone?” Casey asked.

“Who?”

“Jake Carlson,” Casey said. “He’s the one doing… Hubbard’s story for
Twenty/Twenty
. The Project gave him the exclusive on Dwayne, me, all the inside information. You should want him to see this, if it’s real.”

“Of course it’s real,” Martin said, an edge to his voice.

“She’ll see,” the judge said, calmly patting his leg. “Go ahead.”

Casey removed the phone from her purse and dialed Jake’s cell phone, telling him as much as she could without mentioning Martin’s
.45 or sounding as skeptical as she felt.

“It’s Graham,” Jake said when she’d finished.

“I thought you were off that?” Casey said, annoyed. “It could be anyone inside the Project, or someone outside who promised
support, or a friend of Robert’s who turned him on to the case.”

“No. Listen,” Jake said. “Forget about me and my instincts. Six months ago, Graham and his buddies Massimo and Anthony Fabrizio—another
guy I saw him meeting with—tried to pump a hundred grand into Judge Rivers’s campaign account. She’s not even supposed to
have campaign money, but she’s been funneling it to Washington on both sides of the aisle. I’m told it’s a good way to grease
the track to the US Supreme Court. Except she didn’t want their money. She gave it back.”

“Okay,” Casey said, drawing out the word and eyeing the judge suspiciously.

“And… you’re with her?” Jake asked, incredulous.

“We just passed the Seward House,” she said, drawing a guilty look from Martin. “Can you meet us?”

“I’m walking out of Marty’s office as we speak,” Jake said. “I’ll get my car and follow you. Don’t mention Graham. Let’s keep
that card close.”

“Where should he meet us?” Casey asked the judge.

“Where is he now?” Martin asked.

“Parked behind the Barrone & Barrone building on Genesee Street,” Casey said.

“Tell him we’ll wait for him in front of the Auburn Theater.”

“I heard him,” Jake said. “Either way, I want in on this. If Judge Rivers is as bat-shit crazy as it sounds, damn, they’ll
sign me to a
ten
-year contract. If she’s not, then…”

“Then what?” Casey said, studying the back of the judge’s silver head.

“I don’t even want to think about it.”

M
ARTIN PULLED over onto the gravel shoulder of the road and they got out. Jake pulled in behind them, joining them on the road’s
shoulder. Not far off the road in a nest of waist-high grass sat a small red ranch whose remaining paint had faded to a deep
shade of pink.

“I bought the place from the father,” Judge Rivers said, her voice as somber as her face. “He never set foot inside it again.
I felt bad for him.”

“And getting him out of the way kept things quiet,” Casey said.

“He knew Nelson was innocent,” the judge said. “We showed him why.”

“But you still had to buy him off,” Casey said. “How much?”

The judge closed her eyes for a moment. “Nearly everything I had. Quite a bit. He took the money and moved down to Tallahassee
and Martin boarded it up.”

“Martin was the investigating officer,” Casey said, raising her eyebrows at Jake.

“Martin Yancy?” Jake said.

Martin nodded.

“They said you dropped off the face of the earth,” Jake said.

“Here I am,” Martin said. “I don’t see anybody from the old days, though. I make a point of it. I work for a defense contractor
in Rochester. I’ve got a boat on Lake Ontario that I normally go to if Patty comes here for a weekend.”

The mailbox listed atop its metal post and Casey could still make out the name Thornton in the flakes of rust. The windows
of the house had been patched over with plywood boards, warped and faded to gray. The late rays of sunshine lit the roof and
its peak hung with a droning, basketball-size nest of hornets. Out back, the skeleton of a swing set sagged under the shadow
of a massive willow tree, split down the center by lightning or rot or both.

“No one’s been inside since that night?” Casey said, following the judge up the sun-bleached driveway.

“A couple people since that night,” the judge said. “People who needed convincing.”

Martin passed them all with a flashlight in one hand and jangling the keys that hung from a chain on his belt in the other.
He stepped up onto the porch and undid the padlock holding down a metal bar blocking the door. Warm musty air from inside
wafted out at them and with it the fetid odor of something dead inside a wall. Martin sniffed and kicked at the scattered
droppings on the floor.

“Mice.”

The judge pushed past him, snatching up his flashlight and flicking it on before leading them down the gloomy hallway and
into the last bedroom. Casey sniffed at an odor so old that the kick had gone out of its stink. She looked around the bedroom
of a teenage girl, the curling poster of Van Halen on the wall, lace curtains, a Rubik’s Cube next to a corroded lava lamp,
and the velvet painting of a white stallion. Photos tacked to a corkboard bore ghostly images faded beyond recognition. It
took Casey’s eyes a moment to adjust to the flashlight beam and the dim light seeping through the gaps in the boarded windows.
As they did, the chocolate brown mess on the naked mattress and spattered over the wall materialized. Casey realized it was
dried blood, a stain that never leaves without help from human hands.

She stumbled back and into Jake, who caught her by the elbow.

“The coroner said he mutilated her face, first,” the judge said quietly, pointing the light at a mirror on the wall above
some dresser drawers, “the nose, ears, and lips right over there. Evidently, he wanted her to see it. After that, he tied
her to the bed and carved out her eyes. That’s when he raped her, and when he was done, he stabbed her eleven times in the
lower abdomen, circling the navel in a three- to four-inch radius. I’ve heard two different theories from psychologists on
that one, both agree that he was angry with his victim.”

“No shit,” Casey said.

“I know what you’re thinking,” the judge said, “but with most serial killers, it’s about
them
, not the victim. He wanted to punish his victims personally, for some kind of insult, real or perceived we have no idea.”

A chill crept up Casey’s spine like a small spider.

The judge stood staring at the bed for a minute, her light resting on the dusty gray mattress, stained nearly black in places,
before she turned to them. “In thirty-five years as a prosecutor and a judge I’ve seen some crazy things, and heard some crazy
things. Nothing like this.”

Casey cleared her throat and spoke softly. “How does this prove your son’s innocence?”

Her words startled the judge from her trance. “Oh. Right. The cutting was the same in the other three cases I showed you,
and this, here.”

The judge stepped toward the wall and pointed the light at a smear of blood. “You see this?”

“Like a football,” Jake said.

“It’s an eye,” the judge said, pointing the flashlight at other spots on each of the other walls. “See? Four of them. Watching.
Now, look at these again.”

Casey saw now that the judge still held the folder she’d shown her at the lake house in her other hand. The judge shone her
light on the file and found a photo with her finger. Casey studied the black-and-white photo of a blood-spattered wall, seeing
now the same football-shaped smear amid the gore.

“That doesn’t look much like an eye,” Casey said.

“They’re eyes,” Martin said, as if she’d insulted him. “We had a couple different psychiatrists look at them.”

“And you figured that the night of the murder?” Jake asked.

Martin looked confused.

“Myron Kissle said the word came down you were looking for a black man,” Jake said. “How did you get that kind of a lead from
this?”

“Kissle?” Martin said.

“It’s what he told me when I interviewed him,” Jake said.

“For TV? Kissle’s gone loopy,” Martin said. “He used to be a decent cop, but he’s lonely out there living with his crackpot
wife. The man craves attention. Patti heard that he showed up at a PBA meeting a year or two ago in his pajamas.”

Patricia Rivers nodded.

Jake looked around the room. “Well.”

“Well, nothing,” Martin said. “No one put out word for anyone but a killer covered in blood.”

“But he wasn’t covered in blood,” Casey said.

“No,” the judge said, “he was too smart for that, and too smart to get caught.”

“But you caught him,” Jake said.

“Chance,” the judge said, leaving the room and walking slowly through the rodent shit toward the front door.

“Which is a bitch,” Casey said, thinking of Graham’s words.

The judge gave her a funny look and said, “Someone saw him pull his knife outside Gilly’s, and the fight. The police got a
call and put it together with the APB.”

“We figured he was headed for the bus station,” Martin said. “Black guy with blood on his shirt.”

“But not covered in blood,” Casey said, pointing her thumb back inside the house.

Judge Rivers nodded and motioned with her head for them to follow. She pushed through the knee-high grass to the side yard
where a charred oil barrel stood in a tangle of weeds. Around the perimeter of the yard, trees and scrub grew wild with their
obvious intent to swallow up the yard as well as the house itself if given the time. Casey followed, walking gingerly to keep
her heels from sinking into the soft earth.